Meanwhile, budgets for the field sales force or direct-to-consumer advertising remain strong.

The bottom line?
The bottom line is that digital won’t become core to the healthcare professional marketing mix until it impacts revenue. And in a meaningfully way.

Three major changes
Three major changes will need to happen before senior leadership will over-weight digital in the sales and marketing mix. These changes may be difficult, but they are all necessary.

The simple ROI of digital marketing has been proven. What hasn’t been tested is whether digital can scale to the level of significant revenue contribution. Achieving a 3:1 return on a $2M HCP digital spend sounds good. But what do we offer an executive needing to move 5 points of market share on a $500M product?

If non-personal promotion could scale to a $20M spend and deliver that same 3:1 return or more return to the top line, we would have someone’s attention…

Digital marketing can scale, but it needs an analytical foundation to prove it. Only when we can offer real-time analysis on revenue impact will we be able to build the business case.

We must be able to credibly deliver multi-channel analytics before executives will take a bigger gamble on digital.

In short, analytics must move from simple reporting to decision-support.

Data analytics should serve to answer executive and operational questions. It’s not enough to sort through a consolidated database, trolling for insights. Even less helpful is a report on clicks and impressions. The place to start is by asking specific business questions and defining operational KPIs.

The foundation for purpose-driven data is a normalized multi-channel database. But this requires yet another change. Most pharma companies still work within the constraints of independent and siloed databases and simple tactical reporting.

If the digital platform is to be effective, it must capture and report data on every sales and marketing tactic. This requires investments in both technology investment and change management.

3. Senior executive leadership
Using real-time marketing data analytics to power operational decision making is the goal. But this can feel radical within the normal bureaucracy of pharma. It involves a deep level of transparency and collaboration.

Once you start dealing with multi-channel data, you get access to metrics on promotional performance, customer behavior, and vendor productivity that you’ve never had before. Pharma marketers need to become comfortable with that level of transparency.

And this is why executive leadership is so important to making this business shift. Historically pharma has done quite well with a traditional manufacturing sales model. This can lead to marketing myopia. But now, business models are being challenged and outcomes are counted in different ways. Pharma and healthcare are being forced to think differently.

It will take leadership to give marketers and the company the cultural permission to think and act differently.

It Can and Should Scale
Three major changes will prepare pharma to scale digital marketing:

Multi-channel analytics to provide decision-support

A structured database approach to purpose-driven data that answers core business questions

An executive-level mandate to implement change management and support appropriate budget levels

Digital marketing at scale has become normative in most other industries. It’s time for pharma leadership to move beyond incremental spend and move down the path of true digital implementation.

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/12/07/pharma-digital-marketing-will-it-scale/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/12/07/pharma-digital-marketing-will-it-scale/Pharma Marketing: What’s the difference between Customer Insight and Customer Intelligence?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/wD8wbluzEWw/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/10/18/pharma-marketing-whats-the-difference-between-customer-insight-and-customer-intelligence/#commentsTue, 18 Oct 2016 14:55:51 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1351When a business idea makes the cover of Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, and the Nottingham City Council website, you can bet it’s become a buzzword. Analytics-driven “customer insight” has become ubiquitous from business schools to board rooms.

While it’s certainly true that consumer insight will change the way an organization builds its business and customer strategies, there are limits to its operational effectiveness.

In reality, no organization can manage new “insights” every day, every week or even every month, because then they’d be reevaluating their product mix, business focus, target customer and marketing communications all the time, which besides being impractical would obviously be silly.

Insights that emerge from data are valuable to setting organizational and market strategy. This is the value of companies like ZS Associates and IMS Health that create annual or biannual studies for territory alignment or for refreshing a decile analysis for the pharmaceutical industry.

But I would argue that an equally valuable capability is operational decision support, supported by what could be called “customer intelligence.”

Insight is episodic, but decision support is ongoing
Insight-driven goals and metrics are developed for how a product, given certain business assumptions, should perform in the marketplace. Insights are distilled from market and customer data.

Insight is used to achieve differentiation. It’s critical to defining and creating value. Insight, I would suggest, is at the segment or persona level. But once the marketing strategy is determined and we know where we’re going, what our product is and who our target audience is, then customer acquisition and activation becomes the focus, driven by individual customer intelligence.

Customer intelligence is an operationalized decision support process at the individual and segment customer level. It determines messaging, targeting, channel and pacing for all of the practical weekly and monthly marketing campaign decisions.

Example of a Product LaunchFor example, if I’m considering a new product launch, I’m seeking insights into unmet needs, white space, and workarounds that healthcare professionals and/or patients are managing and that my product could address in a unique way. I’ll use insights about the therapeutic environment, existing and future competition, payer and PBM expectations, and the needs of healthcare professionals to create my product positioning.

But once I’ve determined the positioning and I’m beginning to prepare my pre-launch activities, I’ll be building a multi-channel strategy to gather and analyze usage data at the individual customer level to manage my communications.

Insight will define the product positioning strategy, but intelligence will help me win in the day-to-day market competition.

Drawing a Clear Distinction between Art and ScienceAs we think about big data and marketing insight, it’s helpful to draw a clear distinction between insight (used for competitive positioning) and customer intelligence (multi-channel-based insight at the individual customer level that helps us make decisions around targeting and messaging channels).

To me, insight is the art of marketing, and customer intelligence is the science. We use insight to create hypotheses about the true value drivers or unmet needs in a particular marketplace. In many ways, the process is creative, personal and subjective. The best marketers use their intuition, experience and pattern recognition to glean unique insights from the data that will differentiate a product in the marketplace.

As marketers, we make certain brand-related channel and media assumptions, but then we need to use science to measure how people respond and then use that data to make adjustments. These marketing adjustments aren’t at the insight level. You’ve already asked, “What is our market?” or “Do we have the right product?”

These marketing decisions are based on a more defined set of customer criteria. “What segment is this particular doctor in, and where is she on the adoption path to becoming a regular prescriber? What does the data tell us about her channel preferences and content needs?”

Insights come from data at the segment, persona or category level and are used to understand our broad market opportunity.

Individual consumer-level data is about how we’re reaching a specific person or group of people with our product and marketing strategies.

Customer access is the result of executing well on both fronts, but marketing intelligence gives us the operational decision support for how we talk to a specific healthcare professional in a way that earns our right to access.

Why is this important?Knowing the different between insight and decision-support is important when setting expectations with internal teams and with external agencies.

For example, a brand’s AOR is typically responsible for initial branding, positioning and messaging, but they are seldom equipped to manage customer-level intelligence or make operational decisions about changes in channel and messaging.

To sum up, insight happens at a strategic level, and is really about defining product differentiation, the unique value proposition and the segment of the healthcare professional audience we will target.

But at the operational level, intelligence earns you the right to access. It shows you what audiences need what message through which channel – in a consumable way that enables healthcare professionals to practice better and enhance the relationship between physician and patient.

Individual, multi-channel customer intelligence will deliver the access you ultimately need to successfully market and sell a product in the marketplace.

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/10/18/pharma-marketing-whats-the-difference-between-customer-insight-and-customer-intelligence/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/10/18/pharma-marketing-whats-the-difference-between-customer-insight-and-customer-intelligence/Filling the Digital Gap for Pharmahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/OZqQnYxuaEw/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/10/04/filling-the-digital-gap-for-pharma/#commentsTue, 04 Oct 2016 15:26:10 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1603Whenever there is a major paradigm shift in business, there is both a capability and a capacity gap. Rarely do companies have the right people, and enough of them, to fulfill the demands of a new business environment.

This is particularly true of digital marketing for pharma. Pharma management is looking to marketing to build the necessary digital channels to deliver content to healthcare professionals and patients. But marketing is experiencing digital capability and capacity gaps.

Capability: “Do we have the right people to do the work?” Capacity: “Do we have enough of the right people to do the job?”

Most digital Centers of Excellence (COE) or centralized pharma marketing operations groups are lacking in one or both.

Capabilities
Some COEs are evaluating automated digital tactics and analytics platforms. Cloud-based software solutions. But there will still be a need for specialists to review marketing data and make intelligent campaign recommendations.

To deliver relevant and meaningful recommendations requires a broad set of new digital and analytical capabilities. These new roles include data model architects, multi-channel marketing analysts, and digital strategists. Also a writer and designer to turn the analysis into English!

The leadership challenge is to understand one’s capability gap and then determine the smallest set of additional capabilities needed to do these jobs. Most of this expertise will come from experienced-hires, not internal promotions or lateral moves.

Capacity
The capacity question asks, “Can we find and hire, train, on-board and retain enough of these experts? How do we meet the demands from both brands and senior management? We need to deliver digital tactics, develop detailed campaign reports, and then make recommendations for the next wave. This isn’t easy!”

Experts like these are in high demand, and COE managers are often forced to step into the gap and do the work themselves. As a result, pharma doesn’t get the level of insight they need in a timely way and the COE managers experience a high level of burn-out.

What’s the answer to this dilemma?There is an opportunity for digital agencies to step in and help pharma build both the capabilities and the capacity. Pharma agencies need to help their clients build the managerial and technical abilities to meet these new market needs.

For their part, pharma marketers need to recognize that agencies may be their best short-term, and potentially long-term answer. Many pharma companies have tried to deliver digital through internal departments or individual brand managers. But it takes a unique set of capabilities to draw meaningful conclusions, make specific strategic recommendations and then execute campaigns to improve tactical performance. Most of pharma leadership has come to the conclusion that they don’t have the human resources or expertise to do the marketing analytics and digital implementation themselves.

Outsourcing?Perhaps we should consider the dilemma pharma had with R&D productivity 15 years ago. Pharma was resistant to CROs taking over investigative R&D. But then it became increasingly obvious that outsourcing could fill their capability and capacity gaps. Now CROs are key partners with most pharma companies.

So, perhaps we’re at a similar juncture.

Pharma is beginning to show interest in “outsourcing” digital delivery with companies like closerlook. Could outsourcing once again fill pharma’s capability and capacity gap?

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/10/04/filling-the-digital-gap-for-pharma/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/10/04/filling-the-digital-gap-for-pharma/Four Unique Strategies for Data in Pharmahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/ZwuTSOqApqs/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/09/12/four-unique-strategies-for-data-in-pharma/#commentsMon, 12 Sep 2016 19:13:47 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1587A significant share of our business focuses on data. We build and manage marketing data analytics and reporting platforms for pharmaceutical brand leaders. What we’ve learned is that this effort requires much more than just data wrangling. It also involves a commitment to nurturing the right kind of “data mindset” among our clients.

We’ve worked with numerous pharma marketing operations and centralized digital marketing teams over the past few years. As a result, we’ve developed a clear appreciation for the range of commitment levels to data analytics. Based on that understanding, we know what makes for a successful data engagement. And it starts with a minimal level of organizational readiness.

Organizational Readiness
When we are discussing a new data reporting or analytics initiative with a client, we’re looking for “organizational readiness.” Putting one’s commercialization organization on a data analytics platform involves considerable change. It introduces a new experience of marketing transparency and insight. That can threaten conventional assumptions about channels, messages, agency partners and targeting strategies.

Not every marketing organization is ready for these changes. We’ve experienced our share of difficult engagements when working with a client who isn’t ready.

But we also know what it’s like to work with committed leadership that is ready and willing reinvent their future.

We’ve begun to recognize patterns across these experiences. This has led us to identify four distinct strategies or “mindsets.” These mindsets often foreshadow how transformational a marketing data analytics initiative will be.

1. Low impact
The first mindset, which I put in the category of low impact, is when a business owner on the pharma side says, “My boss needs a Big Data story. Do you have a set of reports that I can drop into a Powerpoint presentation? Leadership here is old school, so we don’t have a big budget for this, but if the reports look good enough, I’m sure I can find more money.”

This approach tends to be tactical and project-oriented. It involves a narrow look at a specific trend or channel. Funding is at the product manager level and rarely has significant senior leadership support.

In this case, the organization and its leadership are not ready for true multi-channel data analytics. We will only cause friction and heartache for both of us if we try to force the issue.

2. Aspirational vision
The second mindset recognizes that marketing data is important but leaders feel like they already have most of what they need. The company may have an in-house business intelligence unit that is analyzing existing information. The focus is on short-term marketing ROI.

We’ll often hear, “Your approach to multi-channel marketing reporting is interesting, but we already have a team that’s doing this in-house. We don’t need someone from the outside.”

With these clients, we inquire about the comprehensiveness of the data analysis. Is the in-house team pulling and integrating data from all the sales and marketing channels? Is there a focus on trends and anomalies that could lead to a more competitive market response?

Occasionally we find a robust multi-channel marketing (MCM) effort in place, but it’s rare in pharma. The biggest barrier to comprehensive analytics is often an overworked and understaffed internal team. Their response is often code for “My plate is full and I don’t have the bandwidth to process more data.”

They affirm the vision but don’t have the capacity to execute.

In those cases, we are likely to engender a feeling of competition with the in-house team. That can result in frustration and a lack of mutual respect. That’s not a recipe for a successful partnership.

3. Critical thinking
The third mindset has real potential for success, and these are the companies with whom we like to work. They offer the potential for creating real value.

This mindset starts with the acknowledgement that the organization needs to complement its internal business intelligence team with better reporting and targeting. It is looking for a partner that can fit into its agency model and support the brands, other agencies and the centralized marketing ops group.

We have many clients who are like this — they recognize that they have in-house resources but need to complement them with external tools and expertise. They need a firm that can work side-by-side with their other agencies.

There can be tension if the other traditional and digital agencies feel threatened by a commitment to data and reporting transparency, but with the right leadership in place, partner relationships can be managed in a way that everyone wins.

This approach has been very successful, but it can get better, which is why there’s one more mindset — transformational.

4. Transformational
Clients with a transformational mindset start the partnership with the sponsorship of the senior management team. Leadership commits to leveraging sales and marketing data analytics throughout the company.

Senior leadership knows that comprehensive reporting and insight can be strategic at both the brand level and the enterprise level. They are looking for a distinct competitive advantage. They recognize the sooner they begin to capture longitudinal marketing activity, the greater the advantage over laggard competitors.

The client team likely has a mandate to build both external partnerships and internal resources to make this a full competency. The company’s future may depend on it.

When we get a client who is using language like this, then we know this initiative is not discretionary. This isn’t a flavor of the month or the checking of a box. This isn’t being led by someone who happens to be sitting in a marketing role for a few months and then is going to be rotating out.

This mindset suggests that the company, from the very top, has made a commitment to changing the way they manage their commercialization strategy based on data. When we find an organization with a transformational mindset, it’s a good fit. We know we’ve found a pharmaceutical company that is ready to partner. There is a shared vision to do the heavy lifting that comes with implementing a multi-channel marketing data analytics platform.

When we have clients that fit into this category, it’s exciting.

Mindset Evolution
What happens when we discover that a client is approaching data analytics from one of the less successful mindsets?

If there is a willingness on the behalf of our client to consider change, then we will work together to encourage evolution. We will create ways to inspire the client through examples of what organizational readiness looks like.

Our goal is to help seed a transformational mindset that will nurture a robust data culture. A culture that will lead to a clear competitive advantage. One in which leadership bases all business decisions on data.

This is, simply, the future.

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/09/12/four-unique-strategies-for-data-in-pharma/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/09/12/four-unique-strategies-for-data-in-pharma/The 3 Questions that Data Should Answer for Successful Pharma Marketinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/F8irZs6Ra40/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/07/21/the-3-questions-that-data-should-answer-for-successful-pharma-marketing/#commentsThu, 21 Jul 2016 11:00:26 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1546In a recent posting I introduced the idea of a “master data vortex.” The one place where we gather enough data from enough customer activities to derive truly actionable insight.

If we’re only looking at one set of tactics, we’re only seeing one set of behaviors and attitudes about that channel. But what we really need is a data vortex that can suck in everything. Multiple streams of behavioral and activity data will deliver a much better representation of our customer’s DNA.

Marketing AnalyticsOnce we have that the data, we move on to the next step, marketing analytics. This is when we start to make informed choices. Decisions about budget investment and channel selection. Choices about how we should talk to customers, what messages to send them, and what we’re asking them to do.

At closerlook, we’ve been building a set of robust insight and analytics tools that ride on top of our “master vortex.” These tools allow us to look at a customer across all marketing channels to try to understand them better.

Three QuestionsAt the heart of the matter, all this activity focuses on answering three basic questions about our healthcare audience: Who cares? What do they care about? And when do they need to know?

Who Cares?
When we look at a population of physicians, the first question we need to ask is, “Who cares about our product?” And it’s not going to be everybody. This runs counter to the traditional marketing assumption. “If these doctors have patients that are sick with our kind of disease, then of course they’re going to care about our product.”

The reality is that not everyone does care. A physician may feel a product is too new, too redundant to what is already in the market, or too expensive. Maybe it’s a new class of drugs for which the physician was never trained. Or maybe the physician just feels a particular loyalty to a competitive product. It almost doesn’t matter. The first job of any true marketing analytics platform is to distill the entire population down to those who DO care.

What Do They Care About?
Once we find a physician who cares about a disease and new therapies or approaches addressing a particular disease state, we need to know what they care about. Do they care about the price of the product? Do they care about access? How important is the side effect profile?

What about patient compliance and administration options (is it once a week, or once, twice or three times a day)?

Do they care whether it’s a new product or an old product? Is there a generic substitute? If the product represents a new drug class, do they care about who else is writing this product? Do they care about what key opinion leaders in their specialty are saying about this product?

Rare is the single marketing database that has enough data to answer these questions at the physician level.

The problem with traditional marketing is that it tries to address everybody, often with a single message. As we see from the range of possible attitudes, there is not one answer.

A good marketing analytics platform will help determine exactly who cares and what they care about on an individual level.

When Do They Need to Know?
The third question, “When do we need to know?” is critical because the answer is seldom “right now.” A customer might care, and you might even know what she cares about, but she just might not need to know about it right now.

For example, I often have 30 to 40 different browser tabs open on any given day. What does that tell you about me? It usually means I came across some content that I care about, but now is not a good time. And the only way for me to grab it in the moment without using bookmarks is to open a new tab for it. I click on the link, watch it pop up, then move on. I hope that at some point in the future, I’ll have time to scroll through all of the tabs, review what is still interesting, and then close the browser.

When we try to engage a physician, we may know that they care and even what they care about, but chances are, now is not a good time. So how do we build a tool that allows them to either read it when we push it to them, or find a way for them to pull it later when they really need it?

In some ways, this is one of the most interesting challenges for marketers. Once we’ve zeroed in on this physician, how do we make it really easy for them to access that content when they need it? If we see that they’ve opened an informational email, but they haven’t responded to it, do we give them a little nudge at some point in the future? Or are we willing to create a personal portal for them that allows easy access to archived information?

Getting the Answers RightWho cares, what do they care about, and when do they need to know? These are three of the most important questions that a good marketing analytics platform and digital strategy needs to answer today.

Once marketers have all of their customer data in their master data vortex, they can begin to answer these questions.

Get the answers right, and you are well on your way to building engaging, relevant relationships with your best customers.

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/07/21/the-3-questions-that-data-should-answer-for-successful-pharma-marketing/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/07/21/the-3-questions-that-data-should-answer-for-successful-pharma-marketing/Pharma Marketing: The Heart of Software and the Face of Serviceshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/rD3-xdI3VSc/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/07/06/pharma-marketing-the-heart-of-software-and-the-face-of-services/#commentsWed, 06 Jul 2016 17:14:54 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1565Is the future of digital marketing primarily services or software? That is of course an overly simplistic question, but it’s one I think about frequently. My conclusion? It will be both. In the future, pharma marketing has to have the heart of software and the face of services.

Not just softwareIt can’t be just software — we’ve seen that movie before. Companies create a software application for pharma marketing and sell it to them, but pharma marketers become frustrated because they’re not trained to manage software. Marketing doesn’t think that way.

Not just serviceBut pharma marketing in the future can’t just be services either, even though that’s traditionally the way it has been sold. There’s too much great data available to rely solely on creative.

What we’re finding as we build analytical tools on top of Backstage®, our multi-channel marketing platform, is that data analysis can support great looking and insightful reports showing marketing tactics over time and across a product portfolio. But pharma marketers still want help with the interpretation. They still need an informed marketing strategist to suggest recommendations on what their next move should be.

Software + SmartsSo, pharma marketing in the future will be driven by software and automation at its core, enabling analysis across terabytes of data in a cost-efficient manner. Processes will be automated to get reports into the hands of brand managers in a timely way. But the derivation of meaning from that data will come from a person, someone equipped to draw conclusions, interpret trends and ultimately make strategy recommendations for the brand team.

One of the questions we get at closerlook is, “Are you an agency, or are you a software firm?”

A lot of people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that we’re both, and that we have to be both.

The agency of the future will provide a balance of software and services. The heart of software and the face of services.

In the past, the “data” that fed customer insight and marketing strategy was usually based on gut instinct, with market research used to justify the final decision.

Gut instinctNow there’s nothing wrong with gut instinct, especially when it’s based on years of experience in a consumer category that doesn’t change much over the years. But in an industry like healthcare that’s evolving at such a rapid rate, deciding with one’s gut is as likely to lead to irritable bowels as to true customer intelligence.

Another typical source of customer data has been the quarterly, episodic trend reports from the usual research consulting firms. But that means that the insight is often too little too late.

What is needed today is continuous monitoring of our market and our customers and comprehensive reporting across every customer touch point. And to do that, we need a single centralized master database. I like to think of it as a “master data vortex.” That giant sucking sound? It’s the vortex pulling in every piece of data we can – sales and marketing – so that we have the basis for doing near real-time evidence-based analytics.

Single source of truthHaving a single destination for both personal and non-personal customer communications means there will be a single “source of truth” about which channels and messages are working against which segments. This becomes a rich asset that most brand marketers still dream about.

Building the business, technology and data frameworks and the software tools to support customer insight has been a journey for us at closerlook. We have learned a lot about the infrastructure and politics and cultural change that’s required to get multiple parties to play well together. It’s hard but it’s possible.

Based on several years of experience, we’ve now developed a 3-step approach to setting up and extracting value from a master data vortex.

Collecting the DataFirst, we need to set up reliable data feeds from all partner agencies and third-party data sources of HCP data. Easy to say, tough to do for several reasons.

One is the lack of a common data structure. Every agency runs their campaigns in their own way, often using different definitions of “physicians.” In many cases, there’s also no single unique customer ID common to all agencies, creating an identity problem.

And then there’s the political sensitivity of agencies sharing their campaign response data. In some cases, there may be debate about who even owns that data. Fundamentally, agencies don’t like the fact that someone else is going to take their performance data, manipulate it, and potentially come to conclusions that the agency doesn’t like. This is probably the biggest emotional hurdle to creating a master data vortex, but one that can be overcome with a commitment to good governance and data security.

Implementing a reliable data feed requires an investment in data “plumbing.” This is another challenging area because most brand and marketing agencies have minimal in-house tech resources and don’t really have the patience for implementing the necessary technology to support clean data feeds.

But it must be done – including agreeing on a common data structure and making sure the information is clean and consistent. And then automating it so we can support effective and continuous monitoring.

In order to do this long term, our experience is that pharma marketing leadership needs to introduce new contract language into their master services agreements (MSA) with agencies that require data feeds and outlines the technical requirements for how that data should be structured and transmitted.

Using the DataThe second step to creating value from a master data vortex is making the information relevant and actionable. This includes reporting, analyzing and predicting.

Reporting across a multichannel marketing effort includes measuring campaign results and impact. This information powers the metrics that marketers need to be able to evaluate and justify their work, and it needs to happen consistently across agencies and campaigns. This allows true apples-to-apples comparisons between tactics.

Data analysis is then applied to develop customer intelligence – being able to look at each customer on an individual level. To be able to understand how each physician is responding to clinical and marketing messages. Are they writing the product or not? Through which channels do they prefer to be communicated? What are their additional needs as a provider, as a professional?

Historically, this level of customer intelligence at the individual level has been anecdotal. It may live in the minds of the sales reps who hear the stories, but it rarely reaches the level of the marketing team. So being able to pool sales and marketing activity data together with prescription performance data from organizations like IMS Health showing whether doctors are actually using the product or not is really important. This is what will ultimately define who our most valuable customers are and where we should be investing, and is critical to the people who are actually running the campaigns.

This level of intelligence leads to the ability to predict, the most valuable role of data analysis. By using current data from multiple sales and marketing perspectives, it’s possible to create profiles of “most valuable” and “most growable” customers. As we have found in our work, there are often thousands of “look-alikes” that are not in our target list or sales call plan. In our experience, once we start paying attention to these non-target physicians – showing them some love – we uncover many new writers and millions of dollars of incremental revenue.

The ability to apply predictive analytics against a target market makes the master data vortex a very serious asset. It becomes a gold mine of customer intelligence.

While customer intelligence is fundamental to activating and optimizing campaigns and predicting outcomes, there is an even more strategic application of data analysis that can have lasting impact on brand planning and category leadership. The third way of using data to create value is insight.

Extracting InsightInsight is a broader and more strategic category. It means distilling metrics and customer intelligence to gain an understanding of trends, unmet needs, adjacent markets, new customers, and potential competitors. It answers the higher-level questions: Is our brand positioned right? Is it differentiated and compelling, is it filling a market need?

Insight can help define the strategic planning conversation around portfolio management, investment and M&A activity, and competitive positioning.

Insight is not something that you gain every week or every month; that would require significant strategic rethinking on an on-going basis, which no organization or company can handle. Instead it’s an activity that is typically done on a tri-annual, biannual or annual basis and is used to drive strategy.

Marketing as strategyThis reliance on marketing data for strategic insight involves a cultural change. It assumes a genuine curiosity about the market and raises deeper questions about physicians and patients.

True insight always prompts lots of questions – more interesting questions, more evidence-based questions and more intelligent questions about what are we doing, what are we not doing, and why. Ultimately, the answers to these questions will feed the overall business strategy.

Once this happens, pharma will have successfully moved beyond “gut instinct” and will have the confidence, based on data, of making branding and marketing that are based in reality. And that’s what will be needed to achieve category leadership in this competitive environment.

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/05/13/building-a-master-data-vortex-for-pharma/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/05/13/building-a-master-data-vortex-for-pharma/Pharma Data: Expose It to Understand, Embed It to Transformhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/X7lIkxPCVlU/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/03/08/pharma-data-expose-it-to-understand-embed-it-to-transform/#commentsTue, 08 Mar 2016 20:11:24 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1509In my last blog, I talked about the technical challenges of getting customer data from multiple agencies all in one place. Oh yes, and the corporate culture challenges, too! Challenging but not impossible.

So now what? How do we go about making sense of this bolus of customer data? What’s the process for making data actionable? How can we help pharma brands change the relationship they have with their physician customers?

What we learned is that there are three steps to building a strategic framework.

First, expose the data and the underlying framework of customer behaviors. Second, build a predictive model based on that data. Finally, integrate the model back into the customer experience in a way that’s seamless and automatic.

1. Expose the Data
For decades, finding a link between advertising and customer impact was almost impossible. Direct response marketing offered a step in the right direction, but as soon as more than one marketing tactic was involved, it became difficult to attribute dollars spent to customers created.

This led to an industry-wide acceptance of marketing opaqueness. Very frustrating.

However, digital technology now underpins most marketing activities. With the ability to attribute responses from most marketing tactics to individual customers, true marketing analytics is possible. Making decisions based on truth is now possible.

So our first step after acquiring the data and getting it in one place is to expose it. Bring it into the light. Use visualization tools to reveal trends. Analytics can determine tactic effectiveness and calculate ROI on the individual customer level.

This move to data transparency can be unnerving to some. But it is a critical step on the journey to creating a digital organization.

Exposing marketing data and democratizing access to marketing insights will change the way marketers think about their spend. Budget holders will begin to see and understand the linkages between investment and return by channel, campaign and target customer. Through new tools such as closerlook’s Backstage® Duet, we can create a “rolling ROI” metric. This makes marketing planning and targeting much more dynamic and responsive.

Build a Predictive Model
Tying the exposed data patterns and their insights back to an individual physician opens up a world of new possibilities. For the first time we can build predictive models based on the underlying framework of behaviors. A predictive model considers how a physician is responding to a specific message, channel or campaign. It uses that information to predict how she might respond in the future.

But a predictive model can do more. It can help us create a “lookalike model” to find other physicians like the ones we’re studying. And this is where it gets interesting.

By creating models of our most valuable customers, we can sift through the many healthcare professionals that we don’t currently communicate with to find the ones most likely to respond to our message. We built Target Clarity™ to do this. Find the “lookalikes” and map them to a conversion journey. This provides the framework needed to develop personalized messaging. It also enables a financial model that can predict potential TRx growth as a result of more intelligent targeting and help us decide whether the investment is worth it.

Integrate into the Customer Experience
The final step is to integrate this level of detailed customer insight back into the customer experience. Now we not only know what kind of message to deliver to a customer, we can predict the response. And based on recognizing patterns over time, we can get better at predicting need and be able to deliver a more relevant experience based on that insight.

Customer intimacy has become central to consumer expectations. These elevated consumer expectations now extend to professional relationships as well. Data-enabled insight can help pharma become more responsive. But to appear seamless, we must integrate the data models into the customer experience. As we learn to embed these models into marketing and customer service automation, we build a process that is scalable and cost effective.

Consumer Examples of Data at Work
Two companies that use data in a predictive and seamless way to enhance customer experience are Nest and Tesla.

Tesla, the all-electric auto manufacturer, has created a responsive car. Its Model S car observes its owner’s driving patterns over time. When you get in the car in the morning, it predicts you’ll be heading to work and has already analyzed traffic patterns to let you know the best route to get there.

Same thing in the evening — when you’re heading home, it optimizes your route home. But the car’s system also links to your calendar. This means that when you get in the car during the day to go to a meeting it can recommend the best route and predict how long it will take to get there.

Tesla’s strategy is to use technology to capture personal data to expose the underlying patterns of your day. Then it looks at third-party data like traffic patterns. This allows it to build a predictive model that creates a seamless and optimized customer experience.

Nest, which manages the heating and cooling in your home, is a thermostat on steroids. The product learns your daily habits — when you wake up, leave for work, return home, etc. — and the temperatures you prefer. After about a week or two, Nest is able to predict your daily habits and adjust the thermostat accordingly. It will go into “away mode” during the day to save energy, bring the temperature back to normal before you arrive home from work, and drop the temperature when you go to bed.

Over time, Nest exposes the underlying patterns of your behavior. It builds a predictive model, and then without you even thinking about what it’s doing, it evolves your customer experience in a way that is seamless and automatic.

Both Tesla and Nest represent models for rethinking data and the customer experience.

A Strategic Framework in Three StepsYou start by using a comprehensive data perspective to expose underlying customer patterns. Using this insight, you build a predictive model. Finally you integrate the model back into a new customer experience.

This represents a strategic approach to data analytics. It’s much more than simple reporting. It’s using data to transform how we create and keep customers.

For pharma marketers, this is a framework for creating value for physicians and their patients. But it starts by investing in data and embracing transparency.

To get the data, we built a “master data vortex” to suck all that customer information into one place. It required a lot of plumbing, something we probably had no business doing. But it had to be done.

But that’s a story for next time…

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/03/08/pharma-data-expose-it-to-understand-embed-it-to-transform/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/03/08/pharma-data-expose-it-to-understand-embed-it-to-transform/Pharma Marketing: How We Learned to Deliver Confident Counselhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/GMTjhIylnkc/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/02/22/pharma-marketing-how-we-learned-to-deliver-confident-counsel/#commentsMon, 22 Feb 2016 16:02:35 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1493The transformation of closerlook into the firm it is today started simply enough. We realized that we had become what so many agencies strive for, the “trusted advisor” for our clients.

But that wasn’t enough.

The traditional role of an agency has long been one based on counsel. Agency heads would work hard to create a brand around the idea of a “proprietary” advisory relationship with their clients. Traditional agencies often built their reputations on the “big idea.” Success was when the client trusted you to craft a great story to dominate the media gestalt for a moment.

We started down the path of trusted advisor in earnest in 2008. That was the when we decided to focus exclusively on healthcare. We based this key decision on the realization that it wasn’t credible for a small agency to be an expert in more than one domain.

My badI argued for defining our healthcare focus as including pharma, health insurance, and health IT. That was a mistake. It took almost three years of muddling along before I admitted that “healthcare” wasn’t a narrow enough focus. We needed to drive deeper and narrower.

Hence, digital marketing for pharma.

With that declaration and the subsequent investments in domain expertise, our growth began. And it hasn’t stopped. But why the sudden change in fortune?

Were we now delivering better, more confident counsel?

I have often pointed to our decision to focus as the primary catalyst, but there was more to it than that. And much more to learn.

The role of dataAs we began growing our digital marketing services, we found we were capturing interesting and useful data over the course of many campaigns. We began to learn how customers, in this case, physicians, consumed content and responded to the various programs we created. We built a database to support our digital tactics and to capture this longitudinal customer data.

But being curious, we also wondered how these same physicians were responding to the content they were getting through other sales and marketing channels. Most often other agencies would be handling these other tactics. So we came up with the idea of pulling all the data from these other channels into one single database and doing some serious cross-channel analysis.

The real challenge in managing dataAs you can imagine, the technical challenges in building secure connections to different pharma ad agencies and third-party data sources to bring physician-level marketing data into one database was not easy. But the technical challenges paled beside the political and change management challenges in getting other agencies to willingly cooperate with their campaign data!

But in the end, we prevailed, creating an über customer database supporting multiple brands that our tech colleagues call a “cloud-based multi-tenant CRM application.” We named it Backstage®.

But what does this mean for our ability to deliver confident counsel to our clients? And what are the key lessons we’ve learned?

The new trusted advisorThe most important lesson is that the trusted advisor of the future must be tech-enabled. Even more to the point, analytics-enabled. And for pharma agencies, that requires an approach that is different than for most other industries.

Recently, digital, mobile and social media have taken much more prominent roles in the marketing mix. Data, software and programmatic technologies are asserting themselves at the big table. Vendors with new marketing platforms are selling into pharma marketing ops and IT departments.

But there’s a problem
There is a disconnect between data analytics and traditional agency counsel. Software companies want to sell software and turn the keys over to an internal team. Agencies want to protect their advisory role (and ad revenue) while largely playing lip service to the data.

Over the past several years we’ve seen both problems. Software companies are selling applications that aren’t practical for pharma brand teams or even a centralized marketing ops group to run. Agencies are still pretending that they can give sophisticated marketing advice without the benefit of insight from data analytics.

What we need is a blend of the twoWhat we have learned is that at least in pharma, we need a blend of the two. We need tech-enabled agencies that can manage and interpret a broad spectrum of data and use it to provide specific recommendations for marketing strategy, spend and mix.

In a pharma world with proliferating marketing channels, a general lack of digital marketing sophistication, and a new focus on marketing efficiency, the definition of confident counsel has changed dramatically.

A new operating cultureConfident counsel now involves creating a new operating culture in which pharma marketers manage a rolling set of insights, customer target lists and content recommendations prepared by their enlightened agencies. Where “lean” methods of development are borrowed from the software industry, leading to on-going collaborative models and making annual or even tri-annual POAs largely anachronistic.

For centralized pharma marketing organizations, access to this level of data and analytics across the portfolio is a godsend. They recognize how critical this is to their ability to make decisions. For senior brand managers who don’t have the bandwidth to get into the analytical weeds of their marketing execution, having an agency who is making data-driven recommendations based on a comprehensive view of the performance of their brand in market is exactly what they need now.

A new definition of agencyThe importance of Confident Counsel hasn’t gone away. It’s more important than ever. But its definition, and more importantly, how one ensures that the counsel is not only confident but reliable and actionable, is changing. And that means an entirely different definition of the pharma agency is needed.

In the next post we will look at a several examples of how data insight is not just supporting good counsel, it’s providing new ways of achieving customer access leading to new sources of incremental revenue.

And that’s where this journey gets very interesting…

]]>http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/02/22/pharma-marketing-how-we-learned-to-deliver-confident-counsel/feed/0http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/02/22/pharma-marketing-how-we-learned-to-deliver-confident-counsel/Pharma Marketing: A Peak Behind the Curtainhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/closerlook/difference/~3/bau5HBL-n0M/
http://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/2016/02/08/pharma-marketing-a-peak-behind-the-curtain/#commentsMon, 08 Feb 2016 15:33:56 +0000DaveOhttp://thedifferencemakers.closerlook.com/?p=1477Changes in healthcare in the United States have reached the inflection point where everyone in the industry needs to reevaluate their business model and value proposition.

Full stop.

The parents of changeThese changes didn’t all happen as a result of healthcare reform. Numerous environmental changes like aging demographics, poor diets and exercise habits (which lead to more chronic illness), a shrinking pool of primary care physicians, pressure to reduce the cost of care and improve outcomes and a market that’s evolving towards consumerism have all called into question traditional healthcare business models.

We’re finding that bigger isn’t always better, drugs don’t sell themselves anymore, and the respect that consumers and patients now show healthcare professionals, hospitals, pharma, and health insurance companies has never been lower.

Those of us in marketing face similar business challenges in our role as communicators and brand stewards. Just like our pharma clients, we are rethinking our role and value in the healthcare supply chain.

Agency 2.0?What is the definition of a healthcare agency today? How has the value proposition changed? What are the expectations of an agency version 2.0? Do they require that we rethink not just our role, but also our business models?

Over the course of the next several blog posts, I’m going to describe our journey as a firm and my perspective on what kinds of value that agencies need to deliver and what kinds of moves pharma marketing leadership needs to make to remain relevant and demonstrate leadership.

The closerlook storyThe closerlook story is a narrative of change and evolution, always in pursuit of a fresh way to create and deliver value — at the place where market pull meets our core capabilities as a firm.

In order to remain relevant, we have needed to remain nimble, and that has required us to periodically redefine ourselves, certainly over the past ten years.

It’s about impactWhy are we doing this? Why are we driven? It’s not just about the money, and it’s not just about growth.

It’s about impact.

Our manifesto is about impact. We want to change the way healthcare is bought and sold.

We want to help pharma help physicians help patients at the moment of truth.

This commitment starts with a deep understanding of the unmet needs of physicians and a focus on building our business around helping pharma meet those needs in a unique and sustainable way.

A backstage tour of an agencyI intend this series to be a peek behind the curtain of a technology and creative firm that’s trying to help define what the agency of the future looks and acts like. I’m going to share what we’ve done that’s worked, where we made mistakes, where we helped our clients and where we stumbled. My intention is to spread the learnings and illuminate where we think pharma marketing is headed.

Intelligence and AccessDuring the course of this series, we’ll visit a few key themes. One of them is what I call the twin imperatives of Customer Intelligence and Customer Access. The first step to earning access, whether the customer is a physician, a health system executive or a patient, is by truly understanding the customer. It is only then that we earn the right to promote ourselves. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

Pattern RecognitionI’m also going to talk about the discipline of Pattern Recognition. The benefit to a pharma brand of having a partner like closerlook is our ability to use data and analytics to look across the physician landscape and uncover patterns and trends about how healthcare professionals consume medical content, how they use new technology and mobile in their practice, and what they’re looking for in partners such as pharma.

Relationship MarketingI’m going to talk about about the journey from digital tactics to Relationship Marketing. How it takes a different mindset and orientation to step sideways from pure promotion to creating meaningful and helpful conversations between pharma brands and physicians, at the individual level.

Investing in data and analyticsAnd finally, throughout the series, I’ll talk in a very practical way about how a new platform for communication is created through investments in data. As an industry, we are at a very important inflection point for the integration of data to inform marketing strategy, messaging and tactics. How that data is collected, analyzed and reported involves infrastructure and analytical capabilities that are intimidating to all but the boldest of agencies. But we have gone there, building a suite of analytics-enabled digital marketing solutions. I’ll talk in more detail about how it works and how it provides incredible value to pharma marketers.

Our end goalOur end goal is to create a company, a platform and a new way of communicating that leads to an impact of greater magnitude through increasing the value and effectiveness of marketing.